


Living Legacy

by ishouldwritethatdown



Series: Family Ties [4]
Category: Wolverine (Comics), X-23 (Comic)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family Reunions, Gen, Local Stupid Old Man is a Marshmallow, Marvel Stop Calling Laura Her Deadname Challenge, Return of Wolverine, Wolverine's Only Weakness (A Tiny Angry Teenager), sappy feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-11
Updated: 2018-10-11
Packaged: 2019-07-29 14:56:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16266551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishouldwritethatdown/pseuds/ishouldwritethatdown
Summary: Laura's used to seeing Logans that aren't her Logan. She just lives in the kind of world where you're more likely to run into your loved one's doppelganger than the person you know. When her father died, she resigned herself to only ever seeing copies of him again. And then he's on the doorstep.(Post-Hunt for Wolverine, Post-X-23 #1-5)





	Living Legacy

“Hey, darlin’.”

She’d imagined those words a thousand times since he died. Appearing at her front door, wearing a Stetson and a leather jacket, and the corner of a smile. He looked just the same, with those blue and brown eyes level with hers – decades of ghosts behind them. He was just like she remembered. Like nothing had changed.

Laura’s claws shot out of her arms with a _snikt_ and she plunged one fist at Logan’s neck. He caught her wrist, looking unalarmed, and said, “It’s me.”

She pushed off his shoulder with her other hand and came out of his grip. “I don’t believe you,” she told him. Kudos to whoever cooked up the illusion, but they’d done too much of a good job. He was too perfect. Too good to be true.

“I know,” he said. “I’d be worried if you did.”

“Who is it?” asked Gabby, with her mouth full of toothpaste foam, hanging out of the bathroom door.

“Get dressed and take Jonathan for a walk,” Laura told her.

“But—”

“Gabby,” she interrupted, glaring. Gabby disappeared back into the bathroom and she heard her spit into the sink.

She gestured for Logan to sit down in the kitchen. From her peripheral vision, she watched Gabby leave the apartment, still wearing her Cookie Monster onesie, with Jonathan in tow. Logan didn’t say anything, but she saw him watching them as they left. Laura had her arms crossed. 

“You got any beer?” he asked.

He certainly had his lines down. Laura opened the fridge and paused for a moment, staring at the top shelf. Her hand hesitated even longer, but eventually she plucked the sticky note off where it had been covering the case like a half-assed shroud, and tugged a can from the plastic.

When she placed the can on the table, he turned it around to look at the label and glanced at the post-it note between her fingers. “Is this beer I left in your old apartment?”

The post-it didn’t lie. ‘BACK SOON, DON’T TOUCH!!! -L’

He looked her in the eyes with that expression he did. Like when she was fifteen and he’d realised she was staying up all night monitoring the cameras outside his bedroom at the Institute. She returned his stare as she had then – unwavering, childish stubbornness.

She sat down across from him and watched him crack open his long-awaited beer. There was a pathetic _pst_ , and he put the can to his lips. Almost immediately, he took it away again and put it down, scrunching his shoulders.

“Oh, I’m so not drunk enough to drink that,” he said joyfully. He started to laugh to himself.

His laugh was a rough, awkward sound, like he barely remembered how to do it. She hadn’t heard him laugh often, and when he did it was usually more of a huff and a smile than what most people would call laughter. But now he had his head bent, and his shoulders were shaking, like he could barely contain it. “That’s flatter than Stark’s ass,” he proclaimed.

Laura couldn’t help catching the laugh, and for a moment her heart lifted. Logan was back. He was safe, he was laughing…

This was so not happening.

The laughter faded as laughter did, and she was left unsettled. Was it that easy to get her to let her guard down? This wasn’t her Logan. It couldn’t be. Or, rather it could be, but it wouldn’t be. The universe wasn’t that fair. Out of an evil Logan doppelganger travelling to this dimension and her Logan returning from the dead, she knew from experience which was more likely.

They used to sit on the roof of the school in silence – at first, he had waited for her to speak, but it hadn’t taken many instances of this for him to figure out that she never said the first word. Still, sometimes they didn’t need words. Sometimes all they needed to do was watch the clouds and the stars.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“I’m not allowed to visit my family after coming back from the dead?” he almost went to pick up the beer again, but thought better of it.

She scowled. “You’re not my family.”

“Ouch,” he replied passively.

Her insides boiled at that. “You left! You were gone. You don’t just get to walk back in here like nothing happened!” she yelled. In her head was Kitty’s voice, reminding her that leaving and dying weren’t the same thing. That Logan had truly believed he’d always be around, like he promised.

She had already done this. She had already done the anger and the pushing people away, and then she’d dyed her hair and fought Mister Sinister with her brother and she’d _moved on_.

As she settled, she thought she noticed a hint of sincerity in his face. Maybe she’d been too quick to classify his tone as passive.

He nodded his head down and said, “I’m sorry, Laura.”

“Shut up.” This wasn’t fair. She didn’t need an apology from him. She just didn’t want him to be here. He didn’t belong in this picture any more, with Gabby and Jonathan and this apartment.

But that already wasn’t true. Even knowing this was probably a trick, even knowing that her entire life had moved forward without him, she couldn’t have borne to lose him a second time.

She’d kept his stupid beer in the fridge for a reason.

Logan didn’t seem like a soft person, to look at. He looked short and bad tempered at first glance, and he was. But you didn’t have to be around him very long to start noticing that he wasn’t like that to the core. In fact, it was only a thin surface layer, like the crust around a toasted marshmallow. Not her analogy – Jubilee’s.

That softness was making it harder. All those squishy inside feelings that she had just as much trouble hiding as he did. She wanted to be angry at him, she _was_ angry at him, but she also wanted a big, squishy marshmallow hug.

“I didn’t want to leave you,” he said.

“Shut up, Dad!” she yelled. She buried her face in her hands to hide the tears, like she was a little child. Stupid. Immature.

“Hey!” shouted Gabby after the front door squeaked open. “What did you do?!” she demanded. Four feet and eight inches of Cookie Monster blue and pure malice. _Snikt_.

Laura sniffed, rubbing her eyes. “I told you to go for a walk.”

“I walked,” she said flatly. “Now I’m back.”

Jonathan gnashed his teeth at Logan, tail raised in a warning. Gabby’s face had the same effect. They were quite a duo – Wolverine and Honey Badger.

Logan tapped the rim of his beer can with his finger and considered it. Like he was contemplating knocking the whole vile thing back his throat. He decided against it. “I think that’s my cue. Bye, kids.”

“You can’t just walk out of here!” Gabby exclaimed, shocked. “Who _are _you?! What did you say to Laura?!”__

Logan didn’t make any indication he was going to respond. Jonathan wasn’t appreciating being ignored either, and was dancing around his feet, demanding attention and the corresponding fear.

“Logan,” Laura said, and he stopped in his tracks. He tilted his head around so that he could see her out of the corner of his eye. She was struck again by how real he looked, and it hurt.

“I…” she trailed. “I missed you.”

He turned his head properly so that his eyes met hers. She felt, somewhere deep in her soul, that he meant it when he replied, “I missed you too, kiddo.”

Logan walked out of the apartment, and it was almost like he was never there. She could pretend she had dreamed the whole thing, that this was a regular Tuesday where Gabby demanded pancakes for breakfast and watched cartoons for longer than she should.

She was still holding the post-it in her hand. _Back soon. Don’t touch. -L_

“Explain,” Gabby ordered.

She was asking for a simple answer, a simple two words, but they didn’t feel like they’d suffice. Laura was feeling a big, complicated emotion, the kind that it was good to have telepaths around for. When someone could read your mind, you didn’t need to explain your big, complicated emotions. You could just feel them. And whoever it was could read your mind.

Laura had never seen the appeal of telepathy and she would never, ever wish that her little sister had that particular superpower. But she wished she could give Gabby more than a simple, “Logan’s back.”

“Wait… _your_ Logan? That was… that was your Logan?” she asked. She was staring at the front door, like she had just realised she’d threatened to clobber Captain Marvel with her shoe. “Oh no. I just tried to fight the OG Wolverine. I mean our Wolverine, not like interdimensional future-dystopia grandpa Wolverine, or blondie Wolverine, or… Does he hate me now?”

She rolled her eyes and pushed her hand through her hair. Gabby had a freakout like this every time she met someone famous. She’d lain face-down on the sofa for an hour the evening after she’d met Jean Grey and asked her to guess what number she was thinking of.

“How am I supposed to make a cool impression if I act like a dumb kid all the time?” she’d whined.

“You are a dumb kid,” Laura had replied, not taking her eyes off her book.

She buried her face in a pillow. “I’m the ferocious Honey Badger,” she’d said, muffled, in her Princess Starlight pajamas.

“It’s basically impossible for anybody to hate you,” she assured her sister, now. Gabby had bored right into Daken’s soft side, and she hadn’t even had to brawl or get betrayed by him to do it. Remy had once joked that she had a secondary mutation of being adorable.

Gabby picked up Jonathan and hugged him close like a teddy bear, and then sat down in the chair Logan had vacated with a huff. “Are you sure it’s him?” she asked.

She wanted it so badly. She wanted him to start arguing with Sam about hogging the TV for hockey games again. She wanted him to come home with arrows sticking out of his back and say he hadn’t done anything interesting that day. She wanted to get texts from Jubilee where she’d doodled over a photo that he didn’t know she was taking.

She wanted her dad back.

But all the same, she knew the answer, and no amount of wanting made it change. “No.”

Gabby had the bottom half of her face in Jonathan’s fur. She could see in her eyes that she was starting to ask tricky questions now. “Then why did you say you missed him?”

Laura smoothed out the post-it note against the table. “Cause I do, Gabby. I really do. And if it is him… I want him to know that.”

She got up from the table, taking the beer can with her, and tipped it down the sink.

The thing about grieving an X-Man, was that you could never be sure how permanent it was going to be. When Laura had first inherited the apartment from Logan, she had been half-convinced that he was going to show up any day and ask for his beer. The months had dragged on, and Laura still didn’t move in to her new home. Things stayed in boxes. She ate takeout and kept everything ready to go.

She tipped out the remaining cans in the fridge, and tossed them all in the recycling.

Then she had met Gabby. She had been happy to live off junk food, too, but she’d started to scatter her things all over the place, and half-sort things out of their boxes, and eventually, the little apartment in the Bronx had been a home. Albeit a home that smelled of Chinese takeout constantly and had ugly furniture and not enough space to exercise.

She scrunched up the post-it note and threw it into the bin.

Then Gabby and Wade had moved all the things that made the apartment home into this apartment, and Laura had been persuaded out of the little, smelly hole in the Bronx that her dad had left her. She’d taken the beer with her. It was part of home, part of Logan, and she hadn’t wanted to let go, even then.

Laura found her jacket on the sofa and tied her hair into a messy bun.

“What if it isn’t him, and he tries to hurt you?” Gabby asked.

She zipped her jacket and checked her keys were in her pocket. “I’ll yell,” she answered. “I know I can rely on the ferocious Honey Badger to save me.”

She found Logan in the first place she looked. There was something about rooftops that calmed them both down. Maybe it was being so close to the sky, in the open air, that felt something like freedom.

She sat down beside him and he didn’t acknowledge her, although she knew he saw her. New York from Roosevelt Island was a pretty nice view. It looked better at night, all gleaming lights and hushed voices.

“You never called me Dad when I was alive,” he said.

Laura wasn’t sure how to classify that. Was it an observation, or a request, or something else? She could count the times she had called him her father on her hands, she thought. None of them were to his face. “…Did you want me to?”

He didn’t answer, and he still didn’t turn to look at her. Conversations were sometimes easier when you could fix your eyes on the horizon. “Why’d you stop being Wolverine? You were good at it.”

 _Oh. This._ “Says who?” She crossed her arms across her chest and pulled her knees in closer.

“Kitty. Jean. Gambit,” he listed. All biased sources, of course. “None of them know why you quit, though.”

“I didn’t quit,” she said. “I’m still being a hero, I’m just not Wolverine.”

“And who are you now?” He finally turned to look at her. He was pointed, now, direct. Like a teacher. This was what he’d wanted to talk about.

A chill crawled over her skin, giving her goosebumps under her jacket, and she knew it wasn’t the wind on her arms that was doing it. She found she didn’t want to say it - her instinct was to divert her gaze to the pretty New York skyline. Finally, she mustered, “X-23.”

“Christ, Laura, you can barely even bring yourself to say it.” He sagged against some invisible thing. Disappointment. That’s what this was. “Why are you doing this to yourself?”

She felt her shoulders close around her. “I’m not Wolverine,” she said.

“I’m not saying you have to be Wolverine,” he said, which made her look up. Was this not the legacy conversation? “You have more than two options, kid. It’s not Deadname or Family Burden.”

“It wasn’t a burden. Not… a bad one,” she found herself defending it without even thinking. She thought about Wolverine and everything she’d tried to make that name represent. “Being a hero that people looked up to and relied on… it was nice. I felt like I was doing you proud. Doing Gabby proud.”

“So what happened?” he asked, and there was that gooey middle, leaning his shoulder ever so slightly against hers. He spoke in a gentle voice that was carried on the wind instead of pushing through it.

She had her reasons. Wolverine was a hero and a symbol, and she wasn’t the best person to represent that. It was a title that she’d been given, not one she’d earned. “I should… embrace who I am. Not run from it. X-23—”

“X-23 ain’t, and ain’t ever been, you,” he said, and suddenly his voice took a harsh tone. The kind she’d come to expect from Old Logan. She’d stopped remembering where that tone came from – it was just as much part of her Logan as it was the countless others in the multiverse. “You don’t have to reclaim everything anyone ever says to hurt you.”

“I don’t want it to hurt me,” she said, and resented how infantile she sounded.

“Sometimes there are just things that always hurt, kiddo. Ain’t nothing you can do about it but get through it.”

Things just hurt sometimes. Life hurt. All of her experience up to now supported that, and she trusted Logan to know so to boot. She’d thought she might have been able to take some of it away, but every time she heard that name, she shivered.

“Anyway, you’re back now,” she reminded him. “No vacancy for Wolverines.”

“Your brother’d disagree,” he grunted.

She asked, “Have you spoken to him?”

“Kitty says he’s dead.” He didn’t sound devastated by the notion, but Laura wasn’t fooled. He was worried about him. Daken would be furious if he knew that; good thing he wasn't around to hear it, probably.

“Dickhead. He promised he’d make a gingerbread house with Gabby,” she said.

“I guess he better hurry back, then. I wouldn’t want to break a promise to that munchkin,” he noted. Four feet and eight inches of fearsome warrior, enough to strike fear into the heart of a Wolverine. She’d be thrilled. She’d never talk about anything else.

Laura wasn’t going to tell her about this conversation. “You really wouldn’t,” she agreed.

They listened to the ambient noise of this slice of city for a while, and then he said, “I think I’ll stick with Logan for a bit.”

“What?” she frowned.

He was looking out at the skyline again. “Just Logan. I must have a bunch of vacation days stored up by now.”

“You just took the longest vacation of your life,” she told him.

“That was a vacation _from_ life, that doesn’t count,” he said, and cracked a smile.

Her laugh was short, but it was genuine, and she felt it in her chest. A sudden swell of something missing returning to her. She knew what he was going to say next. He was a predictable old man.

“Still, I’d hate to leave the world without a Wolverine,” he said.

She let the wind fill in the silence for a second. He didn’t rush her to respond. “I already told everybody X-23.”

Logan hummed. “I don’t think it’s taking. Kitty still calls you Wolverine, and so does Gambit. Besides, ‘Wolverine and Honey Badger’ has more of a ring to it than the other thing.”

Laura leaned her head against his shoulder. She didn’t like to make a fuss, didn’t like to ask for affection when it was such a self-indulgent thing. She could usually get by without it, but she’d had two years of missing Logan stored up inside her, and no amount of little-sister-jumping-on-you-and-demanding-pancakes could cure needing a hug from your dad.

Just as she was about to summon up the nerve to ask, he wrapped his arm around her shoulders and kissed the top of her head.

She’d imagined Logan coming back many hundreds of times since he died. Not one of them had ended like this.

“Did you hear that Wolverine’s back?” she pictured someone saying.

“Yeah,” she imagined replying, “and so’s her dad.”


End file.
